Guests in Your Garden: Facts and Folklore About Bugs, Slugs, and Other Garden Creatures

Beryl Hamilton is a freelance writer in Thunder Bay who specializes in
home gardening.

Guests in Your Garden is a whimsical but highly instructive little book
on wanted and unwanted insects in our gardens. As the introduction by
well-known gardener David Tarrant notes, “It’s too bad that many
gardeners are still conditioned to believe that anything crawling should
be eradicated as quickly as possible.” This book informs and reminds
us that such eradication is not only ecologically unfriendly, but
destroys a source of life that can prove endlessly fascinating.

The handbook is easy to flip through and rewarding for its accessible
and entertaining style. The text, which covers everything from ants and
leeches to scorpions, is charmingly divided into sections titled “The
Bold,” “The Beautiful,” “The Motley Crew,” “The
Irritators,” “The Many-Legged,” “The No-Legged,” “Bugs: The
Real Thing,” and “The Not-So-Scary After All.” While the book does
not identify particular species of insects (the penciled illustrations
give a general sense of what the most common varieties look like), it
serves extremely well as a guide to what is out there, and its appeals
for ecological responsibility are powerful.

Convincingly, Davidson reminds us that what we might fear or loathe has
an essential role to play in the organic whole of our garden
communities. The amusing anecdotes relating to insect facts and folklore
that accompany the nitty-gritty information make dipping into this book
delightful for readers of any age. On the subject of caterpillars, for
instance, we discover that “It was a European custom to collect large
numbers of caterpillars and burn them. The resulting ash was put into
the nostrils to stop bleeding.” A sizable bibliography concludes the
book, offering many leads for those interested in learning more about
garden creatures.